Reporting Beyond the Curve: Creating a Government COVID-19 Pandemic Response Balanced Scorecard

Professor Rodney A. Stewart, Griffith University, Australia

Reporting Beyond the Curve 

The COVID-19 pandemic performance reporting in almost all countries, including Australia, has been solely focused on coronavirus related health performance indicators, with infographics and daily statistics provided by Federal and State Government agencies.

However, in a year from now when we reflect on this pandemic response once it becomes adequately suppressed, effectively managed, or vanquished, we will assess each countries government COVID-19 response strategy based on a broader and more complete assessment that includes many short- and long-term indicators.

For most problems facing individuals, businesses, government and society, we tend to make critical decisions after considering diverse multi-criteria, knowing that each decision has pros and cons for each of those criteria. However, for the pandemic response it seems that the whole world has become fixated on a limited number of health related metrics of new daily cases, growth rates, fatality rates, and the flattening of the coronavirus case curve.

This fixation on these narrow pandemic response metrics has already brought commendation and condemnation to different government leaders of states and countries. Leaders of countries that have quickly locked down their citizens and businesses like New Zealand have generally received great praise in the media, while others like Sweden that have an alternative strategy are met with condemnation.

Government COVID-19 Pandemic Response Balanced Scorecard

However, if we are genuinely providing a fair assessment of a government COVID-19 response strategy, shouldn’t we be looking beyond flattening the curve and create a broader goal and an associated longer-term Government COVID-19 Pandemic Response Balanced Scorecard? Developed by Professors Kaplan and Norten three decades ago, the balanced scorecard is a strategic planning and performance evaluation framework that recognises that performance must be evaluated comprehensively and include various leading and lagging indicators. The balanced scorecard has been applied to various fields, including, business, manufacturing, government, healthcare, information technology, to name a few. It can be adapted to pandemic response strategic management and performance evaluation.

If we continue to evaluate the performance of each government’s response based solely on the coronavirus case curve, we will lose sight on broader societal goals and the many other important outcomes and metrics that collectively have more weighting to the average citizen over the short- and long-term. For instance, very long draconian lockdowns and restrictions will undoubtedly ‘flatten the curve’ and can be ordered with an executive order, but may have associated long-term consequences such as mental health issues, student education standards, work prospects, substance abuse, financial insolvency, long-term unemployment, retirement incomes, to name a few. We all know that these consequences exist, but we are not measuring and reporting them in glossy infographics like we are on the daily coronavirus case growth curve or fatality rates, which has prevented us from adequately weighing up whether our government response is appropriate when viewing this pandemic problem holistically.  

A Government COVID-19 Pandemic Response Balanced Scorecard will ensure we maintain a broader perspective on policy decisions while managing the crisis, and in the future, when the emergency setting recedes, we can comprehensively evaluate each governments response in a systemic manner. Citizens can be consulted on what perspectives, goals and indicators should be included in such a scorecard, and how they are weighted against each other. Four preliminary perspectives are proposed by the author, namely, Health, Trust, Financial, and Wellbeing (Figure 1), which represent the broad perspectives for evaluating the government response. Each scorecard perspective includes several goals and measures.

Figure 1. Government COVID-19 Pandemic Response Scorecard

Purposeful Broader Vision and Goals to Navigate us Through this Crisis

Health refers to the immediate health consequences of COVID-19 transmission in society and is currently well measured and reported in the government daily statistical infographics provided by Health Departments, and includes such metrics as new daily cases, hospitalisations, fatalities, growth rates, testing rates, etc. Trust refers to our confidence in our government institutions to provide consistent, transparent, evidence-based, sustainable and well-communicated pandemic response strategies, and would likely be measured through monthly survey instruments of citizens, scientific experts and business/institution leaders. Financial relates to the short- and long-term financial implications of the response strategy including coronavirus response strategy cost, unemployment rates, GDP rates, government debt, living standards, business continuity, and many more. And finally, Well-being refers to people’s mental health during and proceeding the crisis, social connectivity, suicide rates, lifestyle continuity, personal insecurity, economic insecurity, to name a few.

The overall strategic vision is firstly prepared. Then balanced scorecard perspectives, goals and measures are settled on, and their relative importance determined. For example, the Health perspective may attract a 40% weighting towards the strategic vision and each of the other three perspectives 20% each, and measures within those perspectives are also weighted against each other. This allows for a holistic ongoing and end-of-crisis performance evaluation for each country’s or state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic to be evaluated. The performance perspectives, goals and measures presented here are purely to illustrate the concept of needing a holistic evaluation of the government COVID-19 response. If this approach was adopted, community consultation is required to derive the scorecard architecture before embarking on the evaluation process. This should have been done at the early stage of the pandemic crisis or prepared long before such a known risk event, as it would have cemented a whole-of-society vision and approach for the response strategy that reflected the long-term goals, wants and needs of each particular country’s citizens.

COVID-19 Pandemic Response Judgement Day Coming for Country and State Leaders

What is for sure is that when the coronavirus emergency subsides, people will reflect hard on their new ‘lot in life’ and be judging their leaders more broadly on their response strategy, as they start to contend with the long-term implications of their government’s pandemic response. Without a transparent government COVID-19 pandemic response balanced scorecard, it will only be at this future point in time that we will be able to apply the lessons of history to truly assess which government leaders provided the best overall response strategy.